Embarrassed By Your Website's Design?

Is using Wordpress actually free?

Wordpress creates a great eco-system with many available themes and plugins, but since these themes and plugins are written by different developers the quality of each plugin is disputable. As a framework being used by over 20% of the Internet, Wordpress has also become a larger target for hackers to exploit. We have run into many security and hack issues in the past with Wordpress due to the quality of these plugins which result in countless wasted hours of fixes. It should not be assumed that Wordpress is easier to hack, it's just that if a hacker has to spend the time to find a vulnerability in any web platform, he may have higher profit trying to hack Wordpress.

Purchasing a ready made template for Wordpress is relatively cheap and quick to buy, but it's a template and you end up looking exactly like your competitors. These templates cannot be used "as-is" without customization to input your own content and design elements. You end up paying for a third party to customize the template for you and in the end, you may have to spend more time and money that you initially expected.

Is it that important to own the code?

We don't think so. Unless you are Amazon or Google, what you want to own is your data (blog posts, customers, orders, etc...) not the code. In the end, during your business lifetime, you may move from one solution to another, from Wordpress to Drupal to your own homebrew system at some point. During these changes, you migrate your data from one platform to another, not the code.

Unless you have a very strong IT team in-house (no, your IT support team does not count, they are not real web developers), you will still need and rely on a third party service provider to develop and maintain your code base. We would argue that owning the code base is not as important as having fast & secured website fully managed for you at the most reasonable cost so that you can focus on your business. Many businesses believe that their data are more secured if they host and maintain their own systems. It's true if and only if you have a trustworthy, skilled in-house IT team with full-stack knowledge and strong security experience.

Even though Nilead is a closed-source system, we do not lock your data in. Any time you want to migrate to another system, we provide you with the full copy of your data to support you in this migration process.

Is it easy to find alternative development team?

If you ever get an issue with your current team, is it easy to get another team to work on your website? Yes and no. Yes because Wordpress is open-sourced and widely used there are many developers out there. No because many of these developers are inexperienced and ill-equipped and can produce harmful results that may hurt your business in the long run.

Also, anyone with some knowledge of programming in general knows that it's usually a nightmare to work with someone else's code. So in the end, many businesses end up paying a third party to re-do the whole website once again making the "owning the code" point rather useless.

Is Wordpress really flexible?

Originally written for blogging websites, Wordpress is not structured in a modern and extendable way that can be used to develop complex website flexibly. Almost any type of complex features requirement requires certain hacky and hard-coded get-around. Sure enough, you can hack into the code of Wordpress to make it do whatever you want, perhaps you can build the entire clone of AirBnB or Amazon (at least on the surface) on Wordpress. All this, however, comes with a cost: it becomes incredibly difficult to upgrade Wordpress after all the customization (and thus put the website at larger risk of having outdated, unsecured code).

The purpose of this article is not to persuade you to stay away from Wordpress or any other framework, but to show you that there are different solutions for different problems.

If all the pros of Wordpress outweigh the cons for you, you should choose Wordpress (or Drupal, or Joomla, or Magento for eCommerce). However, if you need a custom website that is:

Designed for your brand

Quickly developed and delivered with high coding standards

Fully hosted and maintained so that you can focus on your business

Fully managed with design and development service so that you can grow fast

Then you should consider Nilead Platform. Nilead Platform is built from the ground up with extend-ability in mind, powered with built-in ecommerce features, strong API system, and constantly checked for security.

Our developer team has years of experience working on our platform so they know the system in and out and can always improve and tweak it to fit any special requirement you may have.

Our data centers are placed around the world so that you can be sure that your website can always be accessed from the nearest location of your choice.

about the author

Vu Nguyen

Vu Nguyen is an entrepreneur, a developer, and a founder of nilead.com. While his love is in the backend website development work, his experience covers eCommerce (being both a real online store owner and a developer), Search Engine Optimization, UX Design and Content Strategy.

Since 2005, Vu Nguyen has led and directed UX design, full-stack development teams on projects large and small for corporations, start-ups, individuals and more. He was involved in every task of each project, from idea to concept and vision, prototype, detailed design, build and deployment.